5 Tricks for Creating a Meaningful Social Media Account for Your Restaurant

By Michael Gorman, Contributor

Social media is a powerful tool and basically a must-have for any digital marketing campaign. It allows maximum exposure to your restaurant’s target audience without spending a fortune on advertising costs. Even restaurants running their marketing campaign on a shoestring budget can successfully market their businesses on social media channels. 

Some may wonder if social media is the perfect fit for their restaurant, especially since you run a local business located in a fixed physical address. The answer is – of course! 49% of the people learn about food through social media, so ignoring it seems like bad planning. Here are five tricks for combining social media and your restaurant’s business to tap into that 49% and others who can be easily roped in.

Optimizing How You Use Social Media Platforms 

Each social media platform has its own strengths that should be used to its full potential. For example: Instagram is made for photos and video, Twitter for some quick offers and memes, and Facebook for starting up conversations. At the same time, you should ensure that you're taking notice of content formatting standards for each platform. These two elements are the key aspects of a successful social media marketing strategy, especially for a restaurant. 

Since a restaurant is a local business and has a fixed address, including this info in your social media profiles can lead to meaningful campaigns. Most social media profiles have an address field that can be filled by business profile owners. The key to getting the best value is switching to from a user profile to a business profile for channels that offer this option. 

You can automatically add a physical address on a business page you've created. Even if you have more than one business address, Facebook allows adding additional addresses. Another feature to optimize on this platform is opening hours. This can help customers understand when to drop by to get a bite (especially late-night dining) and where to find you. 

Do not forget to match content formatting appropriately. Every image, video, or written content should be designed with formatting conventions of each social media platform in mind. However, also try to maintain consistency across all your social media profiles to improve brand recognition and recall. 

The visual content should be focused highly on your restaurant's theme – showcasing the kitchen, chef and the team, the images of best recipes, etc. are some of the ideas that always work.

Focusing on User Engagement

As a restaurant owner, probably the first thing in mind is getting more guests walking through the doors of your establishment. As a result, you might deviate from the core purpose of social media marketing, which is inciting engagement. Once that plan goes off-track, it might be a long road to getting more customers from this marketing strategy. 

The reason is that you would have repelled potential customers. How can this be avoided? Do not focus only on promotional content; instead, garner user engagement to build an online community. Most probably, the community will consist mostly of local people that are willing to visit someday. 

There is no need to rush them into making a decision the first day they started following you. Instead, attract them and retain this traffic by creating engaging content consisting of things that interest them. Obviously, this will be food and drink but look beyond that, too. Sports bars should talk about sports and eSports and look for ways of promoting and talking about interesting local events. 

With that in mind, you can create social media content around topics such as #FoodPorn or even conduct surveys and quizzes to open a conversation. You can brainstorm other content ideas to meaningfully engage with potential customers and build a loyal community.

Partnering with a Social Media Influencer 

We’ve mentioned a few times over the past year the usefulness of a social media influencer. You can partner up with influencers to raise more awareness and improve your restaurant's brand image. Try to look for an influencer relevant to the cuisine or cultural taste that matches your restaurant, and definitely look for local influencers who can make a bigger impact in your community. Ask them to visit your restaurant for a free meal while taking photos for social media content. 

Also, being mentioned by prominent individuals can improve your credibility and authoritativeness in the chosen niche. You have quite a lot of options to choose from when choosing an influencer to partner with.

Creating Video Content Relevant to Your Niche

Video content is outperforming on social media channels and you can have a piece of that viral potential. As a restaurant owner, you might think your content categories are limited. You might not consider video content to be feasible for a restaurant business. However, video content for restaurants can bring more engagement. 

People across various social media channels like to watch satisfying videos that may include DIY video or similar content. As a restaurant, you can offer followers a behind the scenes type of video content. For example, you can show them satisfying videos of a piece of how a steak is cut, marinated, and grilled. 

Perhaps you can also create a video that shows how to gut a fish. Your videos can go viral and that means the business you are running will grow in popularity also. Try to brainstorm other unique ways of using video content to gain more visibility and user engagements. 

When video content has been used to its fullest potential, it can generate many followers who are willing to support the business.

Giveaways & Contests

Everybody loves giveaways and contests and this why you should timely use them to get better user engagement. You can promote giveaways like free restaurant cookbooks, dinner vouchers or cooking classes. This will get your current followers interacting with your account and help increase the number of followers your restaurant gets. 

Users can participate by sharing a picture of their favorite meal from your restaurant and use a certain hashtag and tag the business page you are using. Their friends and followers will see these posts and might even start following the business. 

You can offer a free meal or other giveaways such as access to an exclusive buffet. Ensure that you do not overshoot your budget on expensive promotions. It does not have to be very expensive but it just has to be meaningful and thoughtful. 

Combo meal giveaways are usually not that expensive and make customers feel like they are getting something really meaningful in return. Do not post giveaways too frequently because this will dilute their value, and users might not participate actively.

The Bottom Line

You can successfully integrate social media marketing into your restaurant's strategy. There are numerous ways to do this, including optimizing all social media profiles for positive brand identity. You can also partner with influencers, such as prominent chefs or food critics, to build credibility and authority. Using engaging video content is another wonderful strategy to go viral and build more brand awareness. Lastly, you can implement giveaways and contests to build positive user engagement and enhance brand awareness.

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About the Author

Michael Gorman works as a professional academic writer for best paper writing services. His current freelance assignment is with AssignmentHolic, considered among the best writing services for thesis, essays and dissertations in the marketing and finance domain. His future plans include launching an English learning app and be a successful author with some bestsellers on his name.

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